The present invention relates in general to material handling equipment and, in particular, to a new and useful distributing apparatus for collecting informatin carrying sheets in numbered trays which are mounted together to form a magazine. The trays are successively guided past a loading station where they receive the information carrying sheets.
The present invention relates to a distributing apparatus as set forth in the preamble of claim 1.
A distributing apparatus of the above kind is known, for example, from U.S. Pat. No. 2,589,676. In that apparatus, the individual trays, which are connected with a conveyor chain via forked supports and united in an endless magazine, can be successively and automatically loaded with sheets of paper and manually emptied at the same point in the conveyor chain. The individual trays are opened by running the conveyor chain over a small-radius gear wheel. The apparatus can be used, for example, to collect in the trays different pages of several books.
Once the magazine of the distributing apparatus described has been loaded, it must first be emptied before it can be reloaded. Since, in addition, no record is kept of the deposited sheets, the sheets removed from the trays must either be processed immediately or deposited again and marked for subsequent processing. This requires much labor and becomes complicated when greater quantities of sheets have to be handled. In any case, however, the loading process must be interrupted in order to empty the trays.
Another disadvantage is that the magazine must be reset to its starting position before it can be reloaded.